“A political
decision has been taken today to send a two-year mission. It will
be created immediately and deployed in a short time,”
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told journalists on
Monday on the sideline of an EU ministerial meeting in
Luxemburg.

“The mission’s goal would be to assist reforms of the
interior forces and special services in Ukraine,” he added.

The minister didn’t offer any detail on the number of European
specialists to be sent to Ukraine or the scope of their
authority.

The EU has experience with sending its officials to have an input
on governance practices and reforms in places like Somalia, Congo
or Mali. The biggest is the EULEX Kosovo mission, which is second
only to Brussels in the number of EU civil servants serving in
one place.

Thousands of European police, prosecutors, judges and other
officials have been in Serbia’s breakaway republic to help it
with state building and implementing European standards of law
enforcement and justice since 2008 and will remain there until at
least 2016, when their current mandate extended in April this
year expires.

The EU demands that Ukraine takes reforms in many areas of
governance and economy as part of adopting the EU Association
Agreement. The loans it is offering to Kiev come with a
commitment to carry out austerity reforms.

Earlier NATO announced that it would assist Ukraine in reforming
and beefing up its armed forces. Members of the alliance are
expected to form a trust fund to finance the process after a
meeting in Brussels later this week, according to a Brussels
source in the alliance cited Monday by Itar-Tass.

The assistance will not involve supplying weapons to the civil
war-torn country, leaving the decision on offering such deals to
individual member states.

Kiev is conducting a military crackdown on armed protesters in
the east of the country, whom the Ukrainian authorities call
terrorists. The campaign did not stop despite a week-long
unilateral ceasefire announced last week by President Petro
Poroshenko.

The conflict has claimed hundreds of lives, many of the
civilians, as Ukrainian troops are using heavy artillery and air
strike against militia-held cities.